Bloody handiwork of Arkan

'They dragged the husband out of the house first, across the street from the mosque. The local butcher. The soldiers were telling me not to take photographs. Then the wife was dragged out. She was screaming - shots rang out and the husband went down. The wife reached down and took his hand in hers, then they shot her, and she went down.

'Then they dragged out the sister-in-law. I walked back towards some other soldiers who had just taken a kid on the lawn of the mosque. He broke free and tried to escape but couldn't - there was a wall. They shot him in the back. Over the road, they shot the butcher's sister-in-law before the order came to move to another part of town.'

Ron Haviv, an American photographer, described yesterday the handiwork of the Serb whose name chilled the hearts of Croatia and Bosnia during the bloodiest carnage to blight Europe since the Third Reich. The man whose name was synonymous with cruelty without pity, and mass murder: Captain Arkan - aka Zeljko Raznatovic.

'Arkan's Tigers', his paramilitary unit was called, and these were the first Muslims to be killed in Bosnia. Haviv was the only international eye to witness them - four murders out of hundreds of the hundreds of thousands that followed, on the day the Tigers came to the town of Bieljina in north-west Bosnia in March 1992.

The bloodlust of Arkan's Tigers made them the most feared, brutal unit in the Serbian murder machine. The Tigers were the arrowhead of 'ethnic cleansing', the systematic killing first of Croatians and then Bosnia's Muslims.

'He was charming, extremely smart and deceptively evil,' says Haviv. 'Egotistical, baby-faced, and he considered himself the saviour of the Serbian people. He was a likeable guy, except that he was a pathological killer. He liked pretty women.'

Arkan was wanted in six European countries for robbery when war broke out in Yugoslavia - and for murder in Germany. He had shot his way out of a Swedish court, escaped from prison in Belgium and lived in London for two years.

He was one of the very few Serbs trusted by the indicted tyrant and architect of the pogroms, Slobodan Milosevic. He was a member of the Yugoslav security service, with a brief to dispose of Croatian nationalist dissidents.

Arkan recruited his thugs in jails and from among soccer hooligans supporting Red Star Belgrade, a team he owned. Their military presence in the war was first located in the Serb-dominated Krajina region of Croatia, where some of the first shots of the Yugoslav carnage were fired.

But the Tigers first left the savagery of their calling card in the eastern zone of the fledging rebel nation, Slavonia. In the indictment for crimes against humanity issued secretly in 1997 by the tribunal in the Hague, Arkan is accused of the massacre of 250 patients and staff in the hospital in the beseiged and battered town of Vukovar.

The unit's most heinous crimes were committed as the hurricane of Serbian violence crossed into eastern Bosnia - to Bieljina, Foce and Visegrad. The Tigers swept into unsuspecting towns, villages and communities - raping, beating torturing, killing. Arkan's name became a calling card for atrocity.

During the bloobath, Arkan, wearing designer suits, would take rest and refreshment in Belgrade, where people hailed him as a hero.

His wedding to Serbian rock diva 'Ceca' was a festive national occasion, shown live on television.He finally met his match against the Muslims of Bihac, where the Bosnian Army, on the offensive for the first time, drove the Tigers back.

But Arkan reappeared in Kosovo, his Tigers sweeping through Albanian communities as they had in Bosnia. Villagers in Velika Krusha, where the remains of 20 incinerated civilians were found, insist that the massacre was the mark of the Tigers.

As in Bosnia, Arkan was encouraged by the Serbian government. It was at this point during the Kosovo onslaught that the Hague tribunal elected to make the sealed indictment public.

But throughout the carnage, Arkan would entertain and boast to international journalists at the luxury Hyatt Hotel in Belgrade.

Much of the intelligence on Arkan was picked up by the British GCHQ in Cheltenham - but when the War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague asked for it, they were refused.

Ed Vulliamy won various awards for his coverage of the Bosnian war. Stacy Sullivan covered the war for Newsweek.